The child care plan drawn up on a Notting Hill napkin

Why should stay-at-home mums or dads, as well as parents who need child care
for older children, get zero assistance?

Many full-time mothers will have their child benefit removed although they are far from affluent. And yet a bunch of other parents will be able to claim child care costs for under-fives, and the cut-off salary for this assistance is £150,000Photo: Alamy

I have long wondered if the current Government isn’t a giant hoax, orchestrated by a crack team of satirists. Now I’m certain. What else would explain the risible decision to axe one fair way of offering financial relief to all families with dependent children and to replace it with two iniquitous measures?

I felt a wee bit sorry for myself when I learnt that child benefit would be removed from higher earners, but at least we middle classes were all in it together, mending and making do – until it turned out we weren’t.

My household, like numerous others, contains one spouse who reaches the 40 per cent tax bracket (albeit by quite a modest margin and only in recent years) and another who earns about the same as a trainee librarian. So my husband’s and my combined income is less than that of many couples who will continue to receive the benefit.

If that wasn’t galling enough, I now find my culled child benefit is to be redistributed in the form of child care tokens to working parents of the under-fives, starting in 2015. Now, just to be clear, I am totally in favour of the Government offering financial support to working parents for nursery and child-minding fees. But only if the measures are scrupulously fair.

Why should stay-at-home mums or dads, who arguably pay the highest cost for child care since they relinquish an income, get nothing? Who can blame these parents for heeding the words of the child-rearing expert Steve Biddulph, who has warned: “Now there is hard science to back up the common sense. One in five children put into nursery too early develops mental health problems.”

I fervently believe parents should find the best work and family balance for themselves, but only a skewed state places such a high premium on working parents at the expense of anyone who wants their baby dandled on their own knee.

Furthermore, why should parents who need regular child care for older children get zero assistance? All the mums I know are stunned by the mysterious and sudden manner in which their children become 10 times more expensive after starting school. My sons rip through shoes and trousers like they’re made of rice paper; they need books, lifts, babysitting and bigger beds, while our food and energy bills double with each passing year.

I don’t mean this to sound like a sob story. I am only too aware that there are millions of households worse off than mine, but I can’t help feeling angry at the arbitrary and lacklustre nature of the Government’s support for families. I know many full-time mums who will have their child benefit removed this year, although they are far from affluent. And yet, in two years’ time, a bunch of other parents can claim up to £1,200 per child to help them with child care costs for under-fives. The cut-off salary for this assistance is £150,000.

Now, I can easily imagine how the politicos arrived at this top figure. There would have been Notting Hill dinner parties where guests pointed out that 150 grand doesn’t stretch very far in London nowadays; not with the huge mortgages and ramped-up rates of smart private nurseries and the nanny’s TV and en suite. These professionals pay a punitive amount of tax – shouldn’t they get something back?

Well, yes, they probably should – just not at the expense of the great swathes of cash-strapped Middle England which are shouldering an even greater burden. From where I sit, it looks perilously like my axed child benefit could go straight to the pocket of a parent earning three times more than me.

This Monty Python-style farce will cost the Conservatives dear. At the next election many parents will be asking: “What have the Tories ever done for us?” I know I don’t speak just for myself when I say: “Absolutely nothing.”